Using Localization to Drive Mobile Engagement

Mobile marketing is such a tour de force that sometimes it’s easy to be overwhelmed with the possibilities. You can connect with consumers in so many meaningful ways, but sometimes you miss out on really great strategies.

Localization is one mobile marketing strategy that absolutely needs to make your short list.

When you target people who are within a certain geographic proximity to one of your retail locations, you instantly up your opportunity to get them into the store. By providing highly-relevant opportunities to your subscriber base, you’re providing value to them, and thereby building on your relationship with your audience.

There are various ways you can use location to engage your audience through mobile, so let’s look at a few.

SMS & MMS

Because SMS and MMS remain some of the best channels to reach the widest swath of customers, it may be the easiest place to start to incorporate localization strategies. There are a few ways to do this.

The easiest is to ask for a subscriber’s zip code when they opt into your text messages. Then you can send localized offers redeemable at the retail store closest to them.

You can also use geofencing to request access to a mobile user’s location and send them relevant messaging accordingly, even at specific times that you want to drive traffic.

If you own a restaurant near a college, as an example, you could send a buy one get one free pizza deal to anyone living on or near campus at lunchtime as a way to boost midday sales.

While general SMS/MMS messages do have high conversion, when you hyper-localize those offers, you see even more engagement, as well as foot traffic in specific stores.

Let’s see how this works by analyzing Nancy’s shopping behavior. She’s walking out of her Pilates class when she gets a notification that the athletic apparel store down the street is offering 50% off an item. She gets excited and heads there to redeem it immediately. The store was smart to geotarget the Pilates studio, because people there are more likely to be interested in this specific offer.

The immediacy and interruption of push notifications also get results. Where a consumer might wait to open an email from a brand hours or even days, she’s much more likely to read or open a push notification within minutes.

Mobile Wallet

The same concept also works with mobile wallet: sending wallet offers when a subscriber is near a store increases the likelihood of redemption. And if she doesn’t redeem that offer but still saves it to her wallet? You’re there and able to update that offer as often as you like.

For a loyalty program member, here’s how localization could work: you send a push notification to shoppers in proximity to your store between 11 am and noon, announcing: “Earn double reward points today only between 12 and 3 pm! Your closest store is at 85 Camino Real.”

Because of the time sensitivity of the offer (which, conveniently, happens to work out for people who are nearby at that time), customers who might not have planned to visit your store that day will do so to rack up those reward points.

Whichever platform you use, localization can really enhance your approach, as well as drive traffic to whichever store you want to direct it to. Test out a campaign and see how you increase conversions when you factor in location.

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